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Bark poachers in Africa
All bark, no bite
Apr 13th 2000
From The Economist print edition
Stripped naked
ELEPHANTS may get all the attention, but they are not the only living things that man is killing mercilessly for their body parts. Prunus africana, an evergreen tree found only in Africa, is within five to ten years of extinction. So-called "bark poachers" are stripping these trees of their bark, leaving them to die. Others are cutting down entire trees just for the bark.
The reason is that the tree's bark is much sought after as a remedy for prostate disorders. Studies have shown that "pygeum" powder extracted from the bark provides relief from such maladies as benign prostatic hyperplasia, a swelling of the prostate gland. Prunus preparations, which are the best natural remedies for such disorders, fetched some $220m in retail sales last year, mostly in Europe.
Enough of this bounty trickles back to Africa to motivate impoverished farmers. They stripped about 3,500 tonnes of bark last year, up from 200 tonnes in 1980. Although the tree is protected under Appendix II of the CITES accord, which allows only restricted trade, its fondness for mountainous climes makes policing hard. This might not be such a tragedy but for the fact that Prunus is so slow-growing. It takes 15 to 20 years for a tree to produce seeds in the wild, and almost as long to produce the much-coveted bark.
But now researchers at the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Nairobi have come up with a clever solution: trick the tree into producing offspring more quickly. After removing the bark from a branch, they smother the naked limb in peat and cover it with plastic. This induces the branch to produce roots that can then be planted separately.
The technique, known as marcotting, has already been successful with dwarf apple trees in temperate zones. But it is not so easy to adapt to the 25-metre-tall Prunus. Researchers at ICRAF estimate that applying marcotting willy-nilly to trees in the wild would produce a success rate of less than 5%. Much depends on the age of the tree, the season, the humidity, the temperature and so on. By adjusting for such factors, however, they have cut the tree's generation time to three years.
Tony Simons, one of the ICRAF researchers, hopes to win people over to marcotting now that his team has achieved success rates of 70% or so. He also hopes to teach them sustainable techniques that do not kill the tree, such as harvesting bark a bit at a time to allow regrowth. In return, ICRAF wants to help farmers to earn a "green" premium in the market. Given that African farmers get less than a dollar per kilogram of bark collected�under a hundredth of the retail price�such a top-up would no doubt be welcome.
Source: The Economist
CONTENT COPYRIGHT The Economist. THIS CONTENT IS INTENDED SOLELY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES.
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